But she had chosen a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort. She was to be an engineer. She had decided it with her first thought about the vague thing called future. And that first thought had been quiet and reverent, for her future was consecrated, because it was her future. She had played with mechanical toys, which were not intended for girls, and had built ships and bridges and towers; she had watched rising steel and bricks and steam. Over Lydia’s bed hung an ikon, over Kira’s — the picture of an American skyscraper. Even though those who listened smiled incredulously, she spoke about the houses she would build of glass and steel, about a white aluminum bridge across a blue river — “but, Kira, you can’t make a bridge of aluminum” — about men and wheels and cranes under her orders, about a sunrise on the steel skeleton of a skyscraper.
She knew she had a life and that it was her life. She knew the work which she had chosen and which she expected of life. The other thing which she expected, she did not know, for it had no name, but it had been promised to her, promised in a memory of her childhood.
When the summer sun sank behind the hills, Kira sat on a high cliff and watched the fashionable casino far down by the river. The tall spire of the music pavilion pierced the red sky. The slim, black shadows of women moved against the orange panels of the lighted glass doors. An orchestra played in the pavilion. It played gay, sparkling tunes from musical comedies. It threw the fire of electric signs, of ringing glasses, of shining limousines, of nights in Europe’s capitals — into the dark evening sky over a silent river and a rocky hill with prehistorical trees.
The light tunes of casinos and beer-gardens, sung all over Europe by girls with sparkling eyes and swaying hips, had a significance for Kira that no one else ever attached to them. She heard in them a profound joy of life, so profound that it could be as light as a dancer’s feet. And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.
They came from the strange world where grownups moved among colored lights and white tables, where there was so much that she could not understand and so much that was awaiting her. They came out of her future.
She had selected one song as her, Kira’s, own: it was from an old operetta and was called “The Song of Broken Glass.” It had been introduced by a famous beauty of Vienna. There had been a balustrade on the stage, overlooking a drop with the twinkling lights of a big city, and a row of crystal goblets lined along the balustrade. The beauty sang the number and one by one, lightly, hardly touching them, kicked the crystal goblets and sent them flying in tingling, glittering splinters — around the tight, sheer stockings on the most beautiful legs in Europe.
There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter.
The wind blew Kira’s hair across her eyes and sent a cold breath at the toes of her bare feet hanging over the cliff’s edge. In the twilight, the sky seemed to rise slowly to a greater height, growing darker, and the first star dropped into the river. A lonely little girl on a slippery rock listened to her own hymn and smiled at what it promised her.
Such had been Kira’s entrance into life. Some enter it from under gray temple vaults, with head bowed in awe, with the light of sacrificial candles in their hearts and eyes. Some enter it with a heart like a pavement — tramped by many feet, and with a cold skin crying for the warmth of the herd. Kira Argounova entered it with the sword of a Viking pointing the way and an operetta tune for a battle march.
The Soviet official angrily wiped his pen with his checkered handkerchief, for he had made an ink spot on the last page.
“Toil, comrade,” he said, “is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat.”
The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.
“Here’s your Labor Book, Citizen Argounova,” said the Soviet official. “You are now a member of the greatest republic ever established in the history of the world. May the brotherhood of workers and peasants ever be the goal of your life, as it is the goal of all Red citizens.”
He handed her the book. Across the top of the first page was printed the slogan:
PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
Under it was written the name:
Kira Argounova
IV
KIRA HAD BLISTERS ON HER HANDS WHERE the sharp string had rubbed too long. It was not easy to carry packages up four floors, eight flights of stone stairs that smelled of cats and felt cold through the thin soles of her shoes. Every time she hurried down for another load, skipping briskly over the steps, sliding down the bannister, she met Lydia, climbing up slowly, heavily, clutching bundles to her breast, panting and sighing bitterly, steam blowing from her mouth with every word: “Our Lord in Heaven! ... Saint Mother of God!”
The Argounovs had found an apartment.
They had been congratulated as if it were a miracle. The miracle had been made possible by a handshake between Alexander Dimitrievitch and the Upravdom — the manager — of that house, a handshake after which Alexander Dimitrievitch’s hand remained empty, but the Upravdom’s did not. Three rooms and a kitchen were worth a little gratitude in an over-crowded city.
“A bath?” the indignant Upravdom had repeated Galina Petrovna’s timid question. “Don’t be foolish, citizen, don’t be foolish.”
They needed furniture. Bravely, Galina Petrovna paid a visit to the gray granite mansion on Kamenostrovsky. Before the stately edifice rising to the sky, she stood for a few moments, gathering her faded coat with the shedding fur collar tightly around her thin body. Then she opened her bag and powdered her nose: she felt ashamed before the gray slabs of granite. Then she did not close her bag, but took out a handkerchief: tears were painful in the cold wind. Then she rang the bell.
“Well, well, so you’re Citizen Argounova,” said the fat, glossy-cheeked sign painter who let her in and listened patiently to her explanation. “Sure, you can have your old junk back. That which I don’t use. It’s in the coach house. Take it. We’re not so hard-hearted. We know it’s tough for all you citizens bourgeois.”
Galina Petrovna threw a wistful glance at her old Venetian mirror whose onyx stand bore a bucket of paint, but she did not argue and went down to the coach house in the back yard. She found a few chairs with missing legs, a few priceless pieces of antique porcelain, a wash stand, a rusty samovar, two beds, a chest of old clothes, and Lydia’s grand piano, all buried under a pile of books from their library, old boxes, wood shavings and rat dung.
They hired a drayman to transfer these possessions to the little flat on the fourth floor of an old brick house whose turbid windows faced the turbid Moika stream. But they could not afford a drayman twice. They borrowed a wheelbarrow — and Alexander Dimitrievitch, silently indifferent, carted the bundles left at the Dunaevs to their new home. The four of them carried the bundles up the stairs, past landings that alternated grimy doors and broken windows; the “black stairway” it used to be called, the back entrance for servants. Their new home had no front entrance. It had no electrical connections; the plumbing was out of order; they had to carry water in pails from the floor below. Yellow stains spread over the ceilings, bearing witness to past rains.